FALLING IN LOVE 13 



counsel marriage within one's own class, among nice people, 

 with a really religious girl, and so forth ad infinitwn. By 

 many well-meaning young people these deadly interferences 

 with natural impulse are accepted as part of a higher and 

 nobler law of conduct. The wretched belief that one 

 sbiould subordinate the promptings of one's own soul to the 

 dictates of a miscalculating and misdirecting prudence has 

 been instilled into the minds of girls especially, until at 

 last many of them have almost come to look upon their 

 natural instincts as wrong, and the immoral, race-destructive 

 counsels of their seniors or advisers as the truest and purest 

 earthly wisdom. Among certain small religious sects, 

 again, such as the Quakers, the duty of ' marrying in ' has 

 been strenuously inculcated, and only the stronger-minded 

 and more individualistic members have had courage and 

 initiative enough to disregard precedent, and to follow the 

 internal divine monitor, as against the externally-imposed 

 law of their particular community. Even among wider 

 bodies it is connnonly held that Catholics must not marry 

 Protestants ; and the admirable results obtained by the 

 mixture of Jewish with European blood have almost all 

 been reached by male Jews having the temerity to marry 

 * Christian ' women in the face of opposition and persecu- 

 tion from their co-nationalists. It is very rarely indeed 

 that a Jewess will accept a European for a husband. In 

 so many ways, and on so many grounds, does convention 

 interfere with the plain and evident dictates of nature. 



Against all such evil parental promptings, however, a 

 great safeguard is aftbrded to society by the wholesome 

 and essentially philosophical teaching of romance and 

 poetry. I do not approve of novels. They are for the 

 most part a futile and unprofitable form of literature ; and 

 it may profoundly be regretted that the mere blind laws of 

 supply and demand should have diverted such an immense 



